


When Henrietta Freezes Over

by witticaster



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Gen, I know through cultural osmosis that they will eventually smooch, I wrote this as gen where they're figuring each other out but I guess it's sorta shippy?, but this is all I got for now, if you want?, which will be fun
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-11
Updated: 2016-10-11
Packaged: 2018-08-21 19:26:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8257609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/witticaster/pseuds/witticaster
Summary: “Hot as shit.” Ronan scratches his cheek with one finger, then spits his gum out. It lands somewhere off in the dark. “Let’s get slushies.”





	

**Author's Note:**

> I've only read Raven Boys and Dream Thieves, so I guess this is supposed to be set somewhere in-between?? I still have no idea how to write these nerds interacting with each other and I'm never ever ever writing Adam again ever, but?? I kinda liked a few lines, so here, world, have my attempt.

Adam wakes up to the blare of a car horn outside St. Agnes. He tries to remember a swear word, but when that fails, he tries to force himself asleep again.  _Just let me take what I can get._

The horn sounds again. It's not the Camaro's. Deeper than that.

Dread cracks through him: police, his father, a fire? All three? His sheet is still tangled around his sweaty arms as he stumbles towards the window, tripping on plastic and open books. His quick pulse tries to wake him up. His window is one of those old ones you have to crank open, so the horn blasts two or three more times before he can stick his head out into the Virginian sauna.

“ _What_?” he whisper-calls down to Ronan’s BMW.

Ronan just kicks the car door open and swings up, a boot on the driver’s seat, his arm resting on the roof. He looks flickery and yellow under the church’s sole floodlight. Almost illusory.

“Ronan?” 

Ronan pounds his fist on the car roof in a soft rhythm. He looks like he’s waiting in line. 

Adam ducks back into the room, which is just as humid as it is outside but without the breeze to relieve it, and grabs the shirt he’d worn earlier today. It smells sweaty and dusty, like everything else, but that’ll bother him more than it’ll bother Ronan. His jeans button loosely around his hips. He should buy a belt. It’d be faster to just step into his sneakers and crush the heels down, but he imagines the canvas softly falling apart like moss. He takes the extra time to tie his shoes. 

The car horn has remained trustingly quiet down on the lawn. 

Adam is good at stepping softly, so honestly, living in a church isn’t much different from living at home. That's a thing people say, right, "quiet as a church mouse?" It's a good fit. Quiet and dusty and unwanted and small. He creeps in, he creeps out. Only there’s no father to keep an eye out for, just nuns, and maybe God. 

There’s a quick rush of air on his face when he opens the back door, then it settles into stagnant heat again. Adam shoves his hands into his pockets (he has to fix the hole in the left one sometime) and walks to where Ronan is now leaning on the hood of his BMW, arms crossed.

“What,” says Adam. 

Ronan is chewing on a wad of greyish gum. “Hey.” 

“What,” Adam repeats. 

Ronan rubs his palm over his scalp, stretching. The freshly-forming sweat on his arms shines in the bad light. “Place looks nice at night, huh?”

There’s only one answer, so Adam gives it.

“Hot as shit.” Ronan scratches his cheek with one finger, then spits his gum out. It lands somewhere off in the dark. “Let’s get slushies.”

Adam considers refusing only briefly. Slushies feel like the logical progression of the evening. 

The car wakes up with a screech of electric guitar; Adam jumps, fingers slipping on the warm metal of the seatbelt buckle. Ronan dials the volume down while he mutters something. He switches to a channel playing static.

Ronan’s BMW, Gansey’s Camaro. Listening to the Camaro start up is like a slap after not sleeping for a night; the BMW sounds like a cricket song. Adam exhales as the engine hums, making the muscles in his shoulders relax. The A/C kicks in, cool air blasting onto the crook of his neck. For a second, his mind goes mercifully blank as the sweat goes cold on his skin. He shudders, filing this feeling away for when he has to go back up to his room and punch himself into sleep, stripped down to his boxers and broiling in his personal oven. 

The whole thing smells like a leather jacket, and Adam could laugh at himself for worrying about his smelly shirt.  

“Short way or fun way?” asks Ronan, backing out of the church lot. He never uses the rear-view mirror to back out, he has to throw his arm behind the shotgun seat to look over his shoulder, swaying jarringly close. 

“Short way.” 

“I need better friends,” says Ronan, which Adam decides to take as ‘alright.’ 

Ronan goes way over the speed limit, but he’s a good driver, and Adam is still recovering from the damp heat. The BMW has good suspension, no jostles, no bumps. Adam leans his head back on the seat (which is tall enough to support his head, unlike the Camaro, which always leaves him with a sore neck that doesn't answer to aspirin) and shuts his eyes. He obsesses over the thought of accidentally falling asleep to keep himself awake. 

Adam only opens his eyes once during the ride, to look sideways at Ronan. Ronan is looking at him, too, waiting at a stoplight, the car interior colored carmine red. Adam shuts his eyes again.

He opens them a second time when Ronan pulls into his favorite suspicious gas station, locally known as Shady Shell, which will sell you crappy beer without asking for an I.D. The linoleum floor is half-peeled off, the shelves are always half-stocked, the fountain drinks are half-warm. It's an Aglionby boys' trashy paradise.

“Blue Raspberry or Green Apple?” asks Ronan, as they approach the slushie machine. There’s a piece of notebook paper over the Blue Raspberry spout, with ‘BROKE’ written in red marker. “Green Apple,” says Ronan.

He gets a large cup, Adam gets a small. It’s $1.05. Adam can swing it, or he wouldn’t have agreed, and Ronan knowsthat, waiting behind him while Adam wrestles dimes out of his pocket. Free of Gansey’s cramping altruism, Adam doesn’t even care that it’s embarrassing. He ignores it when Ronan slaps down a $20 bill to pay for his own.

The Shady Shell has one booth where you can sit and eat your Sour Cream and Onion Pringles in peace. Ronan slides into one side, Adam takes the other. He  takes a sip of his drink, sugar shocking his tongue. More cool, decadent memories for later. 

Ronan pulls a flask from his back pocket, one of those fancy metal ones you see in Victorian period movies. The Adam of last year tries to ask him where he got it, but the Adam of now reminds him that the pretty flask is pretty normal, considering. He watches Ronan drizzle vodka into his slushie.

“Any more of that, and I’m driving us back.”

Ronan scoffs, finishing off with a good splash. “You wish. See if you can get nine yards with a stick shift. Want any?” He’s already tucking the flask back into his jacket pocket.

“No.”

Ronan nods, pushing his straw through his drink to mix it around. He takes one long drink, not stopping until he pulls violently away with his eyes squeezed shut. “Ah!” He pushes his tongue against the roof of his mouth as he exhales.

Adam drinks again. It definitely tastes green. “How’s Chainsaw?”

Ronan grins. “Fine.” But he says it _fiiiiiiiine_ , he drawls it. Adam bristles at the mockery. He drives the head out of his brain with another sip.

“What’d I do?” asks Ronan.

“You’re an ass,” says Adam. He makes it come out as _yoo-are_ instead of _yore_.

“Fine,” says Ronan, “but why right now?”

Ronan is bad at playing dumb, and Adam is about to snap something about it when he sees the nervous tension in Ronan’s neck. Not a stupid joke, then. Subconscious. He imagines the dust of himself settling onto his friends’ skin.

“Forget it.”

“Okay.” Ronan’s arms are folded on top of the table, his head sunk down to his shoulders as he chews on his straw. He looks like he’s ready to pounce, but it's relaxed: his natural stance. “You like living in a church?”

“It’s a place to live.”

“Yeah.” He sips again, trying to suck up all of the melted syrup and vodka pooling at the sides of his cup. “So, you and Sargent?” 

Adam elbows his half-drunk slushie away. “Gansey put you up to this.” 

Ronan is perfectly still for a moment, then draws his eyebrows together without twitching another muscle in his face. “No.”

“You just want me to send a bank statement back with you, save you the trouble of reporting?”

“Fuck!” Ronan sits up, shoving at the table for emphasis, bringing a heel up to the booth seat and curling his cup to his chest. Imperious, childish. But, most of all, silent. His explosiveness used to annoy Adam. Not frighten, necessarily - Ronan's anger is fueled at the world, not at people - but it'd piss him off, for some reason. Now, however, the part of him that beats Cabeswater’s pulse is almost relieved by it. Adam lives in stagnant air and goes through stagnant motions, one job to another job, one concerned glance to another retort.  

Nobody has forgiven him. 

Gansey hasn’t forgiven him because he won’t admit that there’s something to forgive, Blue hasn't forgiven him because she's too busy trying to figure out why he did it, Noah hasn't forgiven him because Noah plays by different logic, but Ronan hasn’t forgiven him because he doesn’t think it needs forgiving. Maybe he gets it, in a way. There isn’t the nervous, anxious edge of waiting for an apology like there is with Gansey. But Ronan is Gansey’s man through and through, like a knight to a king. It’s bullshit that he won’t admit it.

Ronan sucks petulantly at his drink until it’s gone, then starts breaking the styrofoam apart, leaving indents on the pieces with his short nails. “I’m not here for Gansey,” he says, surprisingly quiet, calm. He licks his teeth, getting the vodka out of the crevices. His tongue is apple-green. “You’re all fucked up.”

“Oh, you noticed?” 

“Don’t be a shit, Parrish. Sure, you’re crazy, but you’re driving yourself crazier. You can only blame yourself for that.” 

“I’m not blaming anyone.” 

“Well, blame yourself.” The cup is too torn up to tear any more. Ronan pushes the pieces into a little pile and says, “Is it messing with your head?”

_It_ doesn't need further elaboration.“I don’t know.” Ronan missed a piece. Adam slides it towards himself before Ronan can get to it, and he pushes it around on the table, where it snags on dried-up soda spills. Ronan watches the styrofoam's journey with interest. “Maybe.”

“Do you think in Latin?” 

"What?"

He looks up at Adam, his mouth sharpening into an odd little grin. It’s hopeful, a kid asking if the tooth fairy really lives in a castle made of teeth. 

“...Yes,” Adam lies, curious.

Ronan laughs, satisfied. “Cool.” 

There are little white and tan dots on his shoulders, not quite freckles. It takes Adam a few seconds to realize that they’re claw marks from his raven. “Do you?”

“Nah,” says Ronan. “I dream like that sometimes, though.” 

Adam flicks the styrofoam his way, and it skids to a stop perfectly in front of the pile. “Cool.” And he feels himself smile.

When they leave, Adam’s cup is stuffed into the brimming trash, and Ronan’s is in pieces on the table. Ronan turns the radio station back to the shrieking guitar. It makes Adam’s ears, his throat, his skin buzz. The road is empty, the car is fast. Maybe this is what it's like to be Ronan, someone outside of the rules, outside of time.  _Does money buy that, or is it even more unobtainable?_ Ronan turns the volume down when they pull up to St. Agnes. Adam says, “Thanks for-“

“Your mouth is green,” says Ronan. 

“So’s yours," says Adam.

“Really?” Ronan cracks his door so that the interior lights come on, then tilts the rearview mirror and bares his teeth at himself. Adam wipes his lips on the back of his hand. After Ronan carefully repositions the mirror he won't use to back out, he says, “Later, right?”

“Yeah. Later.” Adam slides out of the car, tries to figure out if it’d be better to close the door gently or slam it. It ends up being something in-between. Adam circles around to stand in front of the headlights, smelling the exhaust fumes and the dead grass. He can just make out the dark blur of Ronan behind the headlights. He waits. 

Ronan leaves the lot with the guitar wailing behind him.

Adam goes to bed again, his mind iced over with green apple and air conditioning.

**Author's Note:**

> come be my friend I'm paladinical.tumblr.com, I talk about the French Revolution a lot


End file.
